Although the complexity and scope of software has increased tremendously over the past decades, advances in software engineering techniques for producing the software have been only moderate, at best. Software development has remained primarily a labor-intensive effort and thus subject to human limitations.
In commercial software development, increased complexity of products, shortened development cycles, and higher customer expectations of quality have placed a major responsibility on the areas of software debugging, testing, and verification. A key ingredient that contributes to a reliable programming systems product is the assurance that the program will perform satisfactorily in terms of its functional and nonfunctional specifications within the expected deployment environments. In a typical commercial development organization, the cost of providing this assurance via appropriate debugging, testing, and verification activities can easily range from 50 to 75 percent of the total development cost.
What is needed is a method to automate the debugging of software programs.